The purpose of this agreement was to support the collection and analysis of data on cause of death and characteristics of the last year of life in the planning of the 1992 Pretest and 1993 Main Survey of the 1993 National Mortality Followback Survey (NMFS), conducted by NCHS, CDC. This survey will supplement information from death certificates in the vital statistics file with information on characteristics of the decedent. The pretest examined approximately 800 deaths of individuals aged 15 years and over who died in 1992. The main survey will examine approximately 20,000 deaths of individuals aged 15 years and over who died in 1993. This will include 1,000 deaths to centenarians. Collection of field interview data has been completed, with the final death certificate/informant (DC/I) file having been delivered to the NCHS by the Census Bureau in May of 1996. This file contains information keyed from the death certificate file and the informant interviews. Data from the final 1993 mortality file will be merged with the DC/I file and stripped of personal identifiers to form an NCHS working file. Post-stratification adjustment factors and non-response adjustments will be developed to form the final sample weights for each file record. It is anticipated that a preliminary DC/I file will be made available to NIA in late August. At that point analyses will begin on the preliminary file to check for undetected errors and to make recommendations to NCHS for production of the final analysis file, which is anticipated to be available in January 1997. NCHS has concluded agreements with the Social Security Administration (SSA) and the Health Care Financing Administration (HCFA) to link the NMFS data with administrative records from those two agencies. The linking with both SSA and HCFA is well under way. The SSA has been able to verify ( or correct) the social security number for about 98 percent of the decedents. Additional information from the death certificate and the informant questionnaire is in the process of being collected to help identify the outstanding two percent of decedents with a missing or inappropriate social security number. Once appropriate social security numbers have been established on the DC/I file, a subset will be generated to independently link with SSA and HCFA data. The subset will consist of all DC/I records for which the informant has given permission for a link to be made. All linking projects are expected to be completed by the end of February 1997. Early analytic plans call for a joint effort in the production of an NCHS Series 3 report on Life and Death Amongst the Oldest of the Old. Additional analyses will look at trends in reported lifetime history of conditions between the 1986 and 1993 NMFS, examination of lifestyle factors related to death at very old ages, hypotheses regarding decreased use of health services in the last years of life among the very old, and use of linked data from HCFA to study compression of morbidity among the oldest old.